Steampunk as a Postindustrial Aesthetic:

“All that is solid melts in air”

Abstract

The poetic phrase “all that is solid melts in air” from the Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels 1847) conveyed the sense that stable bonds of obligation were being replaced by the ‘cash nexus’ in the commodification of human relationships during nineteenth-century industrialisation. Steampunk is a postindustrial aesthetic born of a reaction against the social and cultural upheaval caused by new digital technologies that has much in common with nineteenth-century critiques of industrialisation, particularly those by proponents of the Arts and Crafts movement. Steampunk uses the weight and substance of Victorian industry as a protest against the increasing minimalism and ‘weightlessness’ of new technologies. It is an aesthetic that works by accretion, adding layers of cogs and clothing to objects and bodies to counter this ‘weightlessness’. Rather than subvert what Karl Marx termed “commodity fetishism” however, steampunk replaces it with ‘historical fetishism’ and turns nineteenth-century industrial objects into symbols of play and leisure. In this it parallels the conversion of former industrial buildings into tourist sites as part of the heritage industry. However, like the Arts and Crafts movement before it, steampunk lacks a coherent political agenda., At least in part, it is an aesthetic more concerned with producing beautiful objects than advocating a clear programme of wider social reorganisation. In its reaction against “all that is solid melts in air”, it romanticises nineteenth-century industrial production and uses its objects for postindustrial leisure consumption.